Archbishop Ramsey The Shape of the Church
Peter Webster ARCHBISHOP RaMSEY e Archbishops of Canterbury Series Series Editor: Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester, UK
Series Advisory Board: Katy Cubitt, University of York, UK; Nicholas Brooks, University of Birmingham, UK; Anne Duggan, King’s College London, UK; Sally Vaughn, University of Houston, USA; Julia Barrow, University of Nottingham, UK; Christopher Harper-Bill, University of East Anglia, UK; Robert Swanson, University of Birmingham, UK; Diarmaid MacCulloch, University of Oxford, UK; Alexandra Walsham, University of Cambridge, UK; Judith Maltby, University of Oxford, UK; Jeremy Gregory, University of Manchester, UK; Stephen Taylor, University of Reading, UK; Arthur Burns, King’s College, London, UK; David Hein, Hood College, Maryland, USA
Developed in association with Lambeth Palace Library archives, this series presents authoritative studies on the Archbishops of Canterbury. Each book combines biographical, historical, theological, social and political analysis within each archiepiscopacy, with original source material drawn from the Archbishop’s correspondence, speeches and published and unpublished writings. e Archbishops of Canterbury series o ers a vital source of reference, of lasting importance to scholars, students and all readers interested in the history of the international Church.
Other titles in this series:
Archbishop Pole John Edwards, University of Oxford, UK
Archbishops Ralph d’Escures, William of Corbeil and Theobald of Bec Heirs of Anselm and Ancestors of Becket Jean Truax
Archbishop Anselm 1093–1109 Bec Missionary, Canterbury Primate, Patriarch of Another World Sally N. Vaughn
Archbishop Fisher, 1945–1961 Church, State and World Andrew Chandler and David Hein Archbishop Ramsey e Shape of the Church
P EtER WEBStER First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Webster, Peter, 1974- Archbishop Ramsey : the shape of the church / By Peter Webster. pages cm. -- (The Archbishops of Canterbury series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6589-2 (hardcover) -- ISBN 978-0-7546-6596-0 (pbk.) 1. Ramsey, Arthur Michael 2. Church of England--History--20th century. 3. Anglican Communion--History--20th century. 4. Religion and politics--History--20th century. I. Title. BX5199.R22W43 2015 283.092--dc23 2014039112 ISBN: 9780754665892 (hbk) ISBN: 9780754665960 (pbk) ISBN: 9781315567556 (ebk) Contents
Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations xi
PART I: YEARS iN OFFiCE
Introduction 3
1 e Church and the Churches 21
2 Church and State 49
3 Church and Nation 65
4 e Church in a Time of Crisis 91
5 e Prophetic Church 115
Conclusion 133
PART ii: THE TEXTS
Editorial Conventions 141
1961 143 Speech to Congress on Public Morality at Church House, Westminster 143 Confidential Memorandum for the Meeting of the Bishops, ‘Church Reform in Relation to the State. A Note for Discussion.’ 144
1962 149 Speech to the House of Lords on the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill 149 vi Archbishop Ramsey
Letter from Archbishops Coggan and Ramsey to Members of both Houses of Parliament 151
1963 155 Ramsey to a Parish Priest, Raymond Hooper, on Honest to God 155 Ramsey to Mervyn Stockwood, Bishop of Southwark, on Honest to God 156 Ramsey to all English Diocesan Bishops on Honest to God 158 A Second Letter from Ramsey to Stockwood on Honest to God 159 Sermon at Requiem for Pope John XXIII, Lambeth Palace Chapel 160 Address to the Convocation of Canterbury after the Anglican Congress at Toronto 161
1964 165 Sermon on Anglican-Orthodox Rapprochement, Preached at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in London 165
1965 169 Sermon at a Service Marking the Anniversary of the Sealing of the Magna Carta, in St Paul’s Cathedral 169 Speech in the House of Lords on Capital Punishment 171 Speech in the House of Lords on the Sexual Offences Bill 175 Ramsey to Prime Minister Wilson on the Relation of Church and State 177 Speech to the House of Lords on Southern Rhodesia 180
1966 183 Ramsey to Oliver Tomkins, Bishop of Bristol, on Relations with Roman Catholics in England 183 Ramsey to E.L. Mascall on Church Unity 184 Ramsey to Chad Varah on Sex 187 ‘The Proposed Canonisation of the English and Welsh Martyrs of the Reformation Period. A Note by the Archbishop of Canterbury’ 189
1967 191 Memorandum on the Visit to Lambeth of Cardinal Suenens 191 Contents vii
Sermon for the Opening of Human Rights Year in Westminster Abbey 194
1968 197 Speech to the House of Lords on the Race Relations Bill 197 Ramsey to Margaret Deanesly on Anglican-Methodist Unity 201 Sermon at the opening of the Lambeth Conference, Canterbury Cathedral 204 Speech in the House of Lords on Reform of the House 208
1969 213 Ramsey to David L. Edwards on Anglican-Methodist Unity 213 Ramsey’s Foreword to a Pamphlet Explaining the Changes Wrought by the Advent of General Synod 214 Ramsey to Eric Kemp on the Anglican-Methodist Reunion Scheme 215 Speech at Dinner on the Commemoration of Guru Nanak 216
1971 219 Speech in the House of Lords on Northern Ireland 219
1972 223 Address in Westminster Cathedral on Northern Ireland 223
1974 227 Farewell Sermon, Canterbury Cathedral 227 Speech in the House of Lords, moving the Church of England (Worship and Doctrine) Measure 229
1982 235 Sermon in Westminster Abbey at a Service Marking the Fortieth Anniversary of the British Council of Churches 235
Appendix: Ramsey’s Staff 239 Bibliography 241 Index 249 This page has been left blank intentionally Acknowledgments
My thanks are due to Clare Brown, Andrew Chandler, Ian Jones, Matthew Grimley and Patrick Harrigan who read and commented upon substantial drafts at various stages. I benefitted greatly from many conversations with John Maiden on Ramsey and the 1960s, and from the comments of Philip Williamson and of conference audiences in Belfast, at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and at the annual meetings of the Ecclesiastical History Society. Particular thanks are due to Clare Brown, Rachel Cosgrave, Matti Watton and all the staff at Lambeth Palace Library, including the late and much missed Melanie Barber. It is by the kind permission of the Librarian of Lambeth Palace that the Ramsey Papers are here cited and reproduced. Thanks are also due to Andrew Atherstone, Clyde Binfield, Perry Butler, Alister Chapman, Alec Corio, David Hart, Tim Hudson, Bill Jacob, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Douglas and Lis McCormick, Stephen Parker, Mark Smith, Todd Thompson, John Webster, Sarah Webster, John Wolffe, and Martin Wellings. I am very grateful to Andrew Chandler as series editor for the opportunity to engage with Michael Ramsey in this book. Thanks are also due to Sarah Lloyd and all at Ashgate for their patience and assistance at every stage. This page has been left blank intentionally List of Abbreviations
BCC British Council of Churches
CIO Church Information Office
GCC Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church (London, 1936)
H. C. Deb. House of Commons Debates
H. L. Deb. House of Lords Debates
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
WCC World Council of Churches This page has been left blank intentionally PART I Years in O ce This page has been left blank intentionally Introduction
Arthur Michael Ramsey was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1961 until 1974, the hundredth occupant of the office. As perspectives on the period have lengthened, his term of office appears more and more to have been pivotal in the history of the Church of England and of the nation as a whole. Ramsey’s time coincides with Arthur Marwick’s ‘Long Sixties’, in which nothing less than a cultural revolution occurred in British life.1 Part of that revolution was in the relationship between the British and their religion, and Callum Brown and others have located the crucial shifts in the religious imaginary in this period.2 At the same time, all the churches were reassessing their relationships with each other, as part of a process with a longer pre-history but given urgency by the times. These parallel movements in popular religious sentiment and within the churches called into question several key relationships that had seemed very settled, and the role of the archbishop in the articulation of those relationships. Ramsey’s time saw the removal of much of the Christian content from the law as it touched matters of public and private morality. Also under scrutiny was the constitutional relationship of Crown, Parliament, people and the established Church. And as the tectonic plates moved at home, so did the role of the archbishop as leader of the global Anglican Communion. The career of Michael Ramsey provides then an important perspective on each of these broader movements. The present work is no biography, but rather an assessment of Ramsey’s tenure as archbishop; but a brief biographical conspectus of Ramsey’s path to Canterbury is necessary nonetheless. When viewed in outline, the shape of Michael Ramsey’s life and career offers few surprises. He was born in Cambridge in 1904, the second of two sons and brother to two younger sisters. His father Arthur Ramsey held a fellowship in mathematics at Magdalene College; his mother Agnes was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, and a teacher, published author, socialist and suffragette.
1 Arthur Marwick, e Sixties. Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c.1958–c.1974 (Oxford, 1998), p.7. 2 Callum Brown, e Death of Christian Britain. Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (2nd ed, Abingdon, 2009), pp.170–92; Hugh McLeod, e religious crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007), passim. 4 Archbishop Ramsey
Arthur Ramsey was the son of a Congregationalist minister, and the family attended Emmanuel Congregational Church, in which Ramsey’s father was a deacon for a time.3 After stints in several schools – some unhappy; some, like that at the choir school of King’s College Cambridge, much brighter – in 1918, Ramsey won a scholarship to Repton School. Here he discovered history and the classics, the benefits of a well-stocked library, the excitements of debate in a politically exciting time and the attractions of the worship of the Church of England, into which he was confirmed at the age of 16. The man responsible for preparing the young Ramsey for confirmation was Geoffrey Fisher, headmaster of Repton, and later to be Ramsey’s predecessor as Archbishop of Canterbury.4 In 1923 Ramsey entered Magdalene College, Cambridge, with a Classical scholarship and a room directly above those of his father. Here he was first secretary and eventually president of the Cambridge Union, the university’s debating society. He was to know well several men whom he would encounter professionally in later life: Selwyn Lloyd, who was to be a Conservative Home Secretary, whose room was next to Ramsey’s; and Patrick Devlin, the eminent lawyer and jurist, and a Lord of Appeal from 1961.5 It was here that he imagined a career in Liberal politics (of which more below). But a more profound reorientation was taking place in Ramsey’s thought and feeling, away from the classics, law and politics, and towards ordination. Ramsey had developed an attachment to the Catholic wing of the Anglican church in stages: under the influence of Eric Milner-White, dean of King’s College Cambridge, while a pupil at its school, and then by his own investigation while at Repton. In Cambridge, he learned from men such as Edward Wynn and E.C. Hoskyns, and from hearing William Temple, then Bishop of Manchester, at a mission to the university in 1926.6 After a change in his direction of study, he left Cambridge with first class honours in theology, and entered Ripon College, Cuddesdon, to begin preparation for ordination in the summer of 1927. A year later he was
3 The facts of Ramsey’s early formation and career are to be found in the biographical studies by Owen Chadwick and James B. Simpson; Owen Chadwick, Michael Ramsey. A life (Oxford, 1990); James B. Simpson, e Hundredth Archbishop of Canterbury (New York, 1962). See also the entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography by Alan Wilkinson. 4 On Fisher’s time at Repton, see Andrew Chandler and David Hein, Archbishop Fisher, 1945–1961. Church, State and World (Farnham, 2012), pp.15–22 5 On the later interaction of Ramsey and Selwyn Lloyd, see John Maiden and Peter Webster, ‘Parliament, the Church of England and the last gasp of political Protestantism, 1961‒4’, Parliamentary History 32; 2 (2013), 361–77, at pp.370–71. 6 Chadwick, Ramsey, pp.22, 25, 27. Introduction 5 ordained deacon, and took a position as curate in the church of St Nicholas in Liverpool. He was ordained in the church at Farnworth in September 1929. Ramsey’s gifts had already been noted, however, and so he was to leave Liverpool before the planned time to become sub-warden of Lincoln Theological College at Easter 1930. Neither his bishop nor his rector favoured the move, but it was inevitable that they should bow to the combined pressure of the theologians Charles Raven and E.C. Hoskyns, backed up by William Temple, by now Archbishop of York. It was to be at Lincoln that Ramsey erected for himself what Owen Chadwick described as a ‘structure of thought’, and where he was to produce his first major work, e Gospel and the Catholic Church.7 That structure of thought was constructed in part by dint of preparing for teaching, at which his hearers recalled him to be outstanding. The traces of his time at Lincoln are also to be found in his lifelong special concern for priests in training, some of which can be seen in his classic e Christian Priest Tod ay. But these six years were most marked by the irresistible rise of his profile in the Church away from Lincolnshire. Amongst many invitations, one that he accepted was to be examining chaplain for the Bishop of Chester; none other than Geoffrey Fisher. Perhaps most surprising was that a member of staff of a provincial theological college, and not even the most senior, should find himself in the company of the foremost theologians from Europe and America, at a meeting in preparation for Temple’s 1936 Oxford Conference on Church, Community and Society.8 Given this growing national renown and the appearance of e Gospel and the Catholic Church – a work recognised as significant even if not universally accepted – Ramsey might well have expected to move closer to the centre of the academic world. But instead, for reasons that remain unclear, Nugent Hicks, Bishop of Lincoln, thought Ramsey needed further parish experience,9 so in 1936 Ramsey moved to the Boston Stump, otherwise known as the parish church of St Botolph in Boston, Lincolnshire, as the most senior of four curates, although his position was in name that of lecturer. There he was to stay until, after a short spell as incumbent of the small parish of St Benet in Cambridge, he went to Durham in January 1940, as Van Mildert Professor of Divinity and canon of the cathedral. After his native Cambridge, the city and county of Durham were to be Ramsey’s next great love. There he met Joan Hamilton, whom he married in the
7 Chadwick, Ramsey, p.45. 8 Simpson, Hundredth Archbishop, pp.78–79. 9 Simpson, Hundredth Archbishop, p.80; Chadwick, Ramsey, pp.51–52. 6 Archbishop Ramsey cathedral in April 1942. Much has been made of Ramsey’s social difficulties and of his incapability in practical things. Joan was to provide the companionship that ameliorated the former, and organisational support in the latter.10 In the faculty he was a popular lecturer and an effective leader, placing it firmly in the first rank in Britain.11 Ramsey continued to write, with the 1949 volume the Transfiguration his major achievement from Durham. At the first meeting of the World Council of Churches, at Amsterdam in 1948, Ramsey found himself on a commission with Karl Barth, Richard Niebuhr and others; the very top flight of world theological talent.12 When in 1950 he was appointed as the Regius Professor of Divinity in his beloved Cambridge, there was nowhere further to go in British theological life. At the age of 45, he had found what he and Joan thought would be his final home.13 Within 11 years he would be Archbishop of Canterbury. He was to reach Lambeth Palace in two steps. After less than two years, the letter arrived from Prime Minister Churchill offering him the see of Durham, confronting him with what Chadwick has rightly described as the most difficult decision he had ever faced. On one side was his great love of Durham; an affection which the selection process showed was reciprocated. But was it wrong to leave Cambridge after such a short time, he wondered, with a job only just begun and certainly not finished? Both archbishops privately thought that it might be. More generally, were his gifts and desires really best suited to the work of a bishop, rather than to the scholarly life, at the peak of which he had only just arrived? Was it to be, in the phrase of his best man, a ‘candle-snuffer’?14 After much deliberation he accepted, and was consecrated in September 1952, and enthroned in Durham the month after. He felt very strongly that to be a scholar, a leader in thought as well as in administration, was central to the function of a bishop. There were few enough of these, he thought, and so it was important that he took the opportunity now it had arisen.15 A number of key preoccupations mark Ramsey’s time at Durham, and as Archbishop of York from 1956. Two of these were the ecumenical and the international. During this time he was joint chair of the committee for the relationship between the Anglican churches and the new Church of South
10 Simpson, Hundredth Archbishop, p.115. 11 Simpson, Hundredth Archbishop, pp.107–108, 111, 114–15. 12 Simpson, Hundredth Archbishop, pp.113–14. 13 Simpson, Hundredth Archbishop, p.114. 14 Chadwick, Ramsey, p.75; Simpson, Hundredth Archbishop, pp.117–18. 15 Chadwick, Ramsey, pp.72–77. On his view of the role of the bishop, see ‘The bishop’ in his Canterbury Essays and Addresses (London, 1964), pp.161–64. Introduction 7
India.16 Ramsey travelled to Evanston, Illinois, for the 1954 meeting of the World Council of Churches, as he had to Amsterdam in 1948.17 In 1956 he led an Anglican delegation to meet leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow.18 At the 1958 Lambeth Conference, at which Fisher was Canterbury to his former pupil’s York, the elderly George Bell, bishop of Chichester, thought Ramsey the outstanding figure.19 In a place like Durham it was easy for Ramsey to give free rein to his imaginative sense of history. The collection ofDurham Essays and Addresses is shot through with the interplay of present with both the city’s and region’s spiritual past. Twice he led pilgrimages to Holy Island, from both Durham and York. In Durham Cathedral he found, in the words of Owen Chadwick, an ‘ecstasy, of history speaking out of sanctified stones’.20 At Auckland Castle, historic residence of the Bishops of Durham, ‘the past was so alive, and my great predecessors seemed like daily companions.’21 Although he was to develop no great attachment to Lambeth Palace as a building, he had a great affection for the palace at Canterbury, as he did for Bishopthorpe, his residence at York, in the garden of which William Temple had often meditated.22 Another central preoccupation was with the clergy, and particularly with young ordinands. One of Ramsey’s biographers taxes him with inattentiveness to the practical needs of his diocese and his staff, and of carelessness over the proprieties of appointments.23 Although there is some justice in this, on occasion he could be practical, such as his move to ensure that the expenses for bishops moving into ancient and enormous houses and acquiring elaborate new costume did not prevent talented men from taking up the role.24 Yet it is a paradox of Ramsey’s career that, despite this lack of sensitivity to practical need, he was
16 George Bell to Ramsey, 5 January 1956, reproduced at Chadwick, Ramsey, p.91. Ramsey presented the report of the committee to the Convocation of York in July 1955; his speech is given in his Durham Essays and Addresses, (London, 1956), pp.73–80; R.C.D. Jasper, George Bell. Bishop of Chichester (London, 1967), pp.350–51. 17 His thoughts on Evanston were published in Durham Essays and Addresses, pp.81–84; Chadwick, Ramsey, pp.85–86. 18 Simpson, Hundredth Archbishop, pp.148–53. 19 Jasper, George Bell. p.384. 20 Chadwick, Ramsey, pp.84, 96, 80. 21 Chadwick, Ramsey, p.79. 22 Chadwick, Ramsey, p.94. 23 Michael De-la-Noy, Michael Ramsey. A Portrait, (London, 1990) pp.162–65. 24 In this, Ramsey’s experience of becoming Bishop of Durham conditioned his actions as archbishop; Andrew Chandler, e Church of England in the twentieth century: the Church Commissioners and the politics of reform, 1948–1998, (Woodbridge, 2006), pp.183–84. 8 Archbishop Ramsey acutely sensitive to the spiritual needs of the clergy. Perhaps his greatest delight was to spend time with clergy in retreat, and he spent much effort while at York in the development of the retreat house Wydale Hall.25 The foreign trips often involved meetings with students of all kinds, whether at Nashotah House in the United States, or at the (Roman Catholic) English College in Rome in 1966.26 A useful study in its own right would be the impact of Ramsey’s classic e Christian Priest Today, first published in 1972 and dedicated to all those men he had ordained in two decades as a bishop and archbishop.27 Revised in 1985, at the time of writing it remains in print, still being read by at least some ordinands.28
Ramsey the Anglo-Catholic
If there was one thing the Protestant wing of the Church of England thought they knew about Ramsey when he came to Canterbury in 1961, it was that he was a Anglo-Catholic. Ramsey had chaired the group charged by Geoffrey Fisher with defining the catholic nature of the Church of England; and indeed the report the group produced, Catholicity (1947) bears many of his fingerprints.29 In international theological summitry, dominated as it was by the Protestant churches, it was often the Church of England that represented the Catholic tradition in the absence of Rome and the Orthodox. Ramsey, often the Anglican representative at such gatherings, had come to be seen as one of the most persuasive advocates of catholicity. Some observers thought that Ramsey had ruled himself out of contention for Canterbury by agreeing to address the highly visible Eucharistic Congress, organised by the partisan Church Union on the eve of the 1958 Lambeth Conference.30 As archbishop, he was to find himself in trouble for suggesting that any world church would necessarily be headed by the bishop of Rome. But Ramsey’s catholicity was not simply that of the Anglo-Catholic movement of his time; not the catholicism which thought the only barrier to the return of the
25 Chadwick, Ramsey, pp.95, 357. 26 Chadwick, Ramsey, pp.213–14, 319. See also the impressions of one Nashotah student of Ramsey in retirement in Dale Coleman’s foreword to Michael Ramsey, e Anglican Spirit (London, 1991), pp.5–6. 27 Published by SPCK. The revised edition went through six impressions in its first 12 years. 28 I am grateful to Andrew Atherstone of Wycliffe Hall for information on this point. 29 Catholicity. A study in the con ict of Christian traditions in the West (London, 1948), passim. 30 Chadwick, Ramsey, p.98. Introduction 9
Church of England to the Roman fold was Rome’s pronouncement on Anglican orders, Apostolicae Curae. Ramsey was no papalist; his was a generous and global catholicity, involving both East and West, in which Rome was only one component part, albeit vital, of a wider enterprise of reunion. No one institution possessed the fullness of the catholicity Ramsey had in mind, and true reunion would see none of the churches unchanged by the process. All the churches needed ‘a penitence of a thoroughly practical kind’, which was not defensive of this or that thing, but that could hold to those things whilst trying to learn to look from a narrow outlook to a wider one. It required a ‘sanctification in the truth’ after the Lord’s own prayer.31 If Ramsey was an Anglo-Catholic, he also sat very lightly to its ritual. His own devotion was centred on and anchored by the Eucharist, but paid only limited attention to the Virgin Mary, and was little concerned with the details of ceremonial.32 When Cardinal Suenens celebrated the Eucharist privately during his visit to Lambeth in 1967, Ramsey especially appreciated the simplicity and lack of minor ceremonial that Suenens used.33 One episode while he was Bishop of Durham showed him unwilling to fight older battles over ritual discipline. The vicar of the most Anglo-Catholic parish in the diocese appealed to his new bishop in 1953 for support for various ritual practices to which some in the parish had objected. Whilst working to achieve reconciliation between the parties, Ramsey gave his sanction to much of the pattern of worship, although elements of it were clearly illegal. The action was not forgotten, and it formed the basis of Protestant objections to Ramsey’s election to York.34 But the objections, whilst explicable in their polemical context, did not reflect Ramsey’s position correctly. He sanctioned the ritual at St Mary Tyne Dock not because he himself particularly relished it, or because he thought it normative for others. Rather, it was in keeping with the tradition of the particular congregation; and continuity in the worship of the Body of Christ in its local setting mattered more than the strict interpretation of canon law. Ramsey, then, held to the substance of English Catholicism without concerning himself with its accidents.
31 Catholicity, p.48 32 Chadwick, Ramsey, p.47. 33 Ramsey memorandum on the visit of Suenens to Lambeth, 19 May 1967, at Ramsey Papers vol.120, ff.283–85, at f.283. 34 Chadwick, Ramsey, pp.83–84, 92. 10 Archbishop Ramsey
The Nonconformist Ramsey
It is the fate of archbishops to disappoint nearly everyone in the Church at one point or another. The correspondence in the Ramsey Papers reveals close and affectionate regard between Ramsey and many Anglo-Catholics. There was, however, one key moment of rupture between Ramsey and the party, over his support for the proposed union between the Church of England and the Methodist Church (on which see Chapter 1). A friend and ally, Victor Stock (later dean of Guildford), noted the conspicuous absence of many of the party from Ramsey’s funeral in 1988, thinking it evidence of the ‘strangulated disapproval’ still felt towards him.35 The evangelicals within the Church had no such high expectations of Ramsey when he came to office. Protestant disapproval centred on his failures at Durham, as already noted. The suspicion of a younger generation of evangelicals went back to 1955, when Ramsey had involved himself in a dispute about ‘fundamentalism’, in connection with a university mission in Durham led by John Stott, rector of All Souls’ Langham Place.36 As well as taking issue with this particular view of the Bible, Ramsey had also criticised the type of missionary methods that he had witnessed in Cambridge as a student, which was taken to be an oblique criticism of the American evangelist Billy Graham who had visited London the year before and on whom many evangelical hopes had rested. But there were greater theological sympathies between Ramsey and the evangelicals than many supposed. They lay in his emphasis on the Bible, on the cross, and on the need for the Church to overcome its preoccupation with its own internal affairs, and to pay greater attention to renewed mission.37 This element of Ramsey’s make-up must be understood in light of his childhood and youth. The Ramsey family religion in Edwardian Cambridge was as part of Emmanuel Congregational Church. Ramsey was later to recall with gratitude the influence of the minister of Emmanuel, H.C. Carter, while on retreat before his ordination.38 Emmanuel was no backwater: visitors to the house included the prominent Nonconformist laymen Bernard Manning and
35 Victor Stock, Taking Stock. Confessions of a City Priest (London, 2001), p.51. 36 Alister Chapman, Godly ambition. John Stott and the evangelical mo ement (Oxford, 2012), pp.40–48. 37 Peter Webster, ‘Archbishop Michael Ramsey and Evangelicals in the Church of England’ in Evangelicalism and the Church of England in the Twentieth Century: Reform, Resistance and Renewal, ed. Andrew Atherstone and John Maiden, (Woodbridge, 2014), pp.172–92, at pp.180–84. 38 Chadwick, Ramsey, p.41. Introduction 11
G.G. Coulton,39 and it is possible that Ramsey there encountered P.T. Forsyth, one of the most significant theologians writing from within English nonconformity. Ramsey was to cite Forsyth throughout his career; few other Anglo-Catholic divines could have thought to recommend Forsyth’s writings on ministry to new ordinands.40 Had not Ramsey shed this skin when preparing for confirmation as an Anglican at Repton? Whilst Ramsey was to move in adulthood towards a Catholic view of Church order and of the Eucharist which would hardly have been acceptable at Emmanuel, he was never to develop the half-conscious superiority of many senior clergy brought up as Anglicans. Ramsey knew something of what it cost to be a religious minority from the history of his native church. The Methodists in the diocese of Durham noticed this and appreciated it, as did the two Nonconformists on whose votes he was elected to the regius chair at Cambridge.41 One of his most significant appointments to the staff of the Durham theology faculty was the Methodist C.K. Barrett, showing an openness to Nonconformist theology not common in 1945.42 The Ramsey Papers show a great warmth between Ramsey and the leaders of the Free Churches with which he dealt, and the ‘tumultuous welcome’ he received at the inauguration of the United Reformed Church in 1972 showed the degree to which some Nonconformists regarded him as ‘our archbishop’.43
Ramsey the Politician
Had events, and Ramsey’s mind, taken a different course, historians might have been considering the legacy not of Michael Ramsey the archbishop, but of Ramsey the career politician. Until part way through Ramsey’s time as an undergraduate, his mind was firmly set on pursuing a career in Liberal politics. The Ramsey home had been political in its atmosphere. Agnes Ramsey was a socialist and campaigner for the enfranchisement of women, active in the Labour party.44 The Ramsey family religion had in it a large dose of social conscience. Once at Cambridge, Ramsey attracted attention as a debater, becoming president of the Union in 1926. Just as Liberalism in Parliament was being squeezed between
39 Chadwick, Ramsey, p.7. 40 Michael Ramsey, e Christian Priest Today (2nd ed., London, 1985), p.4. 41 Chadwick, Ramsey, pp.82, 69. 42 Chadwick, Ramsey, pp.61–62. 43 Chadwick, Ramsey, pp.341–42. 44 Chadwick, Ramsey, p.5. 12 Archbishop Ramsey the Conservatives and the new force of Labour, Ramsey embraced a liberalism without the strait-jacket of doctrine: pragmatic, individualist, anti-imperialist and with a concern for the weak and the poor. Herbert Asquith witnessed Ramsey on a campaign platform, and thought him one day likely to lead the party. Had his studies not intervened, he might have accepted the invitation of the party in Cambridgeshire to be its parliamentary candidate.45 Despite this promise, by a gradual process that was complete by 1926, Ramsey came to the conviction that his future lay in ordination and not in politics, or rather, that his motivation to political service was most completely realised in the context of a wider vocation. He later dismissed his politicking as an ‘adolescent enthusiasm’. Here the historian must dissent from his subject, as Owen Chadwick observed.46 Ramsey’s whole career must be read in part as a working-out of those political convictions, in which their ethical substance was first incorporated in a wider vision of the divine plan for humanity, which vision was then applied theologically to particular problems. In many cases a Christian concern with the social ineluctably became political. Of some significance here was a fortnight spent working amongst the poor of the East End of London in 1926, at the time when his mind was moving towards ordination. While at Liverpool, he saw similar deprivation and social tension as he had in the East End.47 When at Durham, he regularly attended the miners’ gala, that show of trade union strength, mindful that his predecessor B.F. Westcott had mediated between miners and mine owners in the strike of 1892.48 As we shall see in Chapter 5, Ramsey was to speak fluent politics with a strong religious accent, but by the 1960s the Liberal Party was in eclipse, and some of its most distinctive concerns had been redistributed between the Labour and Conservative parties. Ramsey thus had no obvious home amongst the main parties, in contrast to the identification with Labour of a figure such as Mervyn Stockwood, Bishop of Southwark, or the reflex Conservatism of many of the other bishops.49
45 Chadwick, Ramsey, pp.20–21. 46 Chadwick, Ramsey, p.26. 47 Chadwick, Ramsey, p.43. 48 Chadwick, Ramsey, p.82; see also his address to a congregation of miners in Durham Cathedral at Durham Essays and Addresses, pp.99–102. 49 On Stockwood’s political views, see Michael De-la-Noy, Mervyn Stockwood. A Lonely Life (London, 1996), passim. Introduction 13
Ramsey’s Theology
Ramsey was a professional theologian before he was a bishop, and he continued to write prolifically during his time in office, and indeed for several years after retirement. A word is necessary about the limits of this study’s concern with Ramsey’s work qua theology. The present author was born just a few days after Ramsey retired in 1974, and was still at school at the time of Ramsey’s death. As such, I had no personal acquaintance with or memory of Ramsey whatever, and so had no stock of ‘Ramsey stories.’ These stories – anecdotes of Ramsey’s clumsiness, ‘otherworldliness’, shyness and awkwardness in company – are legion.50 Michael De-la-Noy laid much of this to Ramsey’s charge, thinking that the apparent indifference to his staff and the painful silences in conversation were willed, a moral failing.51 I intend to show at length elsewhere that much of this apparent eccentricity can be accounted for by a retrospective ‘diagnosis’ of autistic spectrum disorder. Yet for Ramsey, at least one kind of otherworldliness was a critical part of the Christian life and was, in its right measure and context, something to be cultivated. At the consecration of a bishop in the United States in 1962, he contrasted the ‘superabundant activity’ of the modern Church with the need for a ‘readiness to go apart in quietness, waiting upon God’. Of course the Church must be ‘deeply involved with the present age, studying it, learning its techniques, sensitive to its aspirations and fears’, yet this is best enabled when there is ‘that otherworldly strain of which All Saints Day is the reminder.’ The Church needed to ‘see our present tasks in the light of our heavenly goal’.52 It was not by accident, therefore, that unlike Fisher, Ramsey by and large eschewed any involvement in the public affairs of the Church after his retirement, writing rather less on the nature of the Church and its doctrine, and much more on the life of prayer and the work of the Holy Spirit. Ramsey lived some 13 years in retirement, first back at Cuddesdon, then at Durham once again, and then briefly at York.53 From this relative seclusion emerged two studies in particular: Holy Spirit (1977) and Be still and know (1982).54 Here was an indicator of Ramsey’s true priorities.
50 Chadwick, Ramsey, pp.112–22. 51 Michael De-la-Noy, A day in the life of God (Derby, 1971), pp.37–40 and passim. 52 ‘The Bishop’ in Michael Ramsey,Canterbury Essays and Addresses, pp.161–64, at p.162. 53 Chadwick, Ramsey, pp.382–97. 54 Holy Spirit was published by SPCK; Be still and know by Fount Paperbacks in association with the Faith Press. 14 Archbishop Ramsey
However, it is Ramsey’s theology written during his time at Canterbury which is more visible in this study. Ramsey’s most systematic theology has attracted modest but significant attention in more recent years, most notably in studies such as that by Jared Cramer and the collection of essays edited by Robin Gill and Lorna Kendall.55 Ramsey’s theological writing appears extensively here, including long-form academic writing such as e Gospel and the Catholic Church,56 but also his sermons (both published and unpublished), addresses to the Church Assembly, occasional pastoralia, book reviews and all kinds of other forms, all of which contain or flow from Ramsey’s theology, broadly defined. The present work, however, is one of history; and so all Ramsey’s writing and speaking is here deployed in order to explicate Ramsey’s actions as archbishop and to assess their coherence as a whole. It necessarily sets Ramsey’s theology in the context of the state of Anglican self-understanding of the time, but sets aside any questions of the degree to which Ramsey’s thought was typically ‘Anglican’. Insofar as a consensus is visible, it would seem to be that Ramsey’s most enduring extended work, and most rewarding of continued reading, is his first, e Gospel and the Catholic Church (hereafter GCC).57 This work figures prominently here, since its concern with the nature of the Church is closest to the main preoccupation of this study. Whether it is Ramsey’s most innovative or enduring work of theology proper, when examined as part of the development of the discipline, is beyond the concern of this study. It will become apparent that the central preoccupation of GCC with the shape of the Church and its fundamental purpose was one which gave Ramsey categories of analysis with which to deal with the fundamental questions that the 1960s posed. Those difficult questions that pressed in upon all the churches are examined at length in Chapter 4. Ramsey seemed imperturbed in the face of issues that engendered panic and despondency in others, and it was the view of providence and of history laid out in GCC that was his protection. There had been an optimism in liberal Anglican theology in the early part of the twentieth century, the history of which Ramsey knew intimately, as his 1959 Hale memorial lectures showed.58 According to this view, human nature was essentially good,
55 Jared Cramer, Safeguarded by Glory: Michael Ramsey’s ecclesiology and the struggles of contemporary Anglicanism (Lanham, MD, 2010); Robin Gill and Lorna Kendall (eds), Michael Ramsey as eologian (London, 1995). 56 London, 1936. 57 See Rowan Williams, ‘Theology and the Churches’ inMichael Ramsey as eologian, ed. Robin Gill and Lorna Kendall (London, 1995). pp.9–28. 58 Published as From Gore to Temple. e Development of Anglican eology between Lux Mundi and the Second World War 1889–1939 (London, 1960). Introduction 15 and perfectible given the right tools; society and its institutions embodied in some rather vague way the right order of things, and all was progressing, evolving, according to the divine plan. Despite his great affinity with the liberal theologian F.D. Maurice, Ramsey’s apprehension of the course of human and divine history was darker and more textured. It was the theology of GCC that protected him from the shocks of the 1930s and the 1939–45 conflict that were to destroy the more naïve optimism of the earlier period, and prepared him for the different but related challenges of his time as archbishop.59 GCC is concerned not with what the Church of Christ could be if only it were more efficiently managed. It is not concerned with what the Church should do, in social action or in the cause of peace. Its concern is with what the Church is; what its very existence shows to the world of the saving work of Christ, and the business of sin and judgment. Just as the New Testament shows a Church ‘scandalous and unintelligible to men’, the Church in every age should, and indeed is able to do little more than ‘teach men to die to self and to trust in a Resurrection to a new life’. For the Church to meet the philanthropist and the reformer on their own terms, and to speak of its purpose in those terms, was to miss its deeper purpose. The Church ‘amid its own failures and the questionings of the bewildered … with its inconsistencies and its perversions and its want of perfection’ exists only to point beyond itself.60 As Rowan Williams has noted, there was an extremism, even an impossibilism in the picture Ramsey painted in GCC which, if unchecked, threatened to render any action of Christians within it superfluous, even futile.61 But there was a counter-balance in Ramsey’s very present sense of the action of God in history and of the sureness of God’s help to His people. Even if the Church could do little by its own efforts, the study of the sweep of the Church’s history showed that the gates of hell would indeed never prevail against it. Ramsey’s article on the authority of the Bible for Peake’s commentary of 1962 is shot through with a vivid apprehension of the Scriptures as the record of God’s sovereign direction of history, and His mighty acts of redemption of His people.62 It was this conviction that enabled Ramsey to keep his head as the consciousness of religious crisis of the early 1960s was combined with a wider sense of societal upheaval, culminating in conflict in Ulster, economic crisis and political instability in the early 1970s. On a retreat to Iona, as the West found itself increasingly set around
59 For some of what follows, I am indebted to the suggestive essay by Williams, ‘Theology and the Churches’, pp.9–28. 60 Ramsey, Gospel and the Catholic Church, pp.3–8. 61 Williams, ‘Theology and the Churches’, pp.11–12. 62 Reprinted as e Authority of the Bible (Edinburgh, 1962), passim. 16 Archbishop Ramsey by the threat of nuclear extinction, ‘ecological doom and the restive poor’ in the developing world, and with Christianity ‘in retreat, and near rabble’, Ramsey could transport his hearers with the serene prospect of ‘the great Christian centuries to come’.63 This was no mere piety, no rallying call to a faltering army, but a conviction of the nature of God and His relationship to His church. There is, however, a tension, if not quite a paradox, in Ramsey’s thought, between this great salience of the corporate Church on the one hand, and on the other, a very personal sense of the individual soul as of equal weight in the divine plan. Ramsey had a particularly vivid apprehension of the interrelatedness of individual Christians both between churches and across nations. As Chapter 1 will show, although Ramsey yielded to none in his holding to Catholic essentials when thinking institutionally, he knew that at a local level, fellowship, worship and prayer between Christians in divided churches would always outpace, and should indeed lead, structural change nationally. The sources edited for this study show that Ramsey often reached for examples of local co-operation as examples of where the churches should be heading, in Northern Ireland, or in South Africa, or between Anglicans and Methodists or Roman Catholics. This connection was not only geographical. Rowan Williams has noted the lack of ‘hermetic seals’ between believers in the past and in the present: they are ‘involved with and in a community of believers extended in time and space, whose relation to each other is significantly more than just one of vague geographical connection and temporal succession. In theological shorthand [they are] a member of the Body of Christ.’64 This sense of the reality of the communion of saints is key to understanding Ramsey’s thought. Everywhere in his writing does the reader find Ramsey reaching for the life of an individual: in relation to Northern Ireland, it is St Patrick; on pilgrimage to Whitby, it is St Hilda.65 Chapter 1 shows him dealing with the diplomatic complexities of the commemoration of the English Roman Catholic martyrs; but it is to the saints and martyrs common to all English Christians that he directs attention. For Williams, the study of the Christian experience of the saints of the past has a different quality for Christians: ‘our immersion in the ways in whichthey responded becomes part of the way we actually hear the call ourselves.’66 For
63 The words of Christopher Martin, editor ofGreat Christian Centuries to Come. Essays in honour of A.M. Ramsey (Oxford, 1974), p.1. 64 Rowan Williams, Why study the past? e quest for the historical Church (London, 2005), pp.26–7. 65 See, for instance, his reference to Patrick in an address in Westminster Cathedral, 14 March 1972, Ramsey Papers vol.319, ff.63, at f.63. 66 Williams, Why study the past? p.31. Introduction 17
Ramsey, both the saints of old and the places in which they lived and worked were ever-present in imagination and in prayer. The ‘great cloud of witnesses’ that the writer to the Hebrews had seen was more than purely metaphor.67
Ramsey’s Biographers
As with all the archbishops, the business of assessing Ramsey’s record began before it had ended, and indeed before it had begun. A pattern has developed of biographical studies of the archbishops appearing as they arrive in office, such as Margaret Duggan’s study of Robert Runcie, published in 1983.68 Ramsey had his, e Hundredth Archbishop of Canterbury, which was published in the United States in 1962.69 Perhaps the first extended attempt at an assessment was the collection of essays edited by Christopher Martin and published in 1974, Great Christian Centuries to Come. Three of the contributors to the collection were associated with the radical monthly Prism, and Martin thought Ramsey a ‘man of vision … Not for him the prudential foresight of the politician, balancing achievement the year after next with compromise today; not for him the ancillary voice to the best intentions of public men’. For David L. Edwards, a participant in much of what he described, Ramsey’s time would come to be seen as ‘a chapter in the triumph of the Christian gospel over English conservatism.’70 Not all commentators on Ramsey have been as positive. One of the two full- length studies of Ramsey’s life and career which appeared simultaneously in 1990 is that by Michael De-la-Noy.71 Already a biographer of figures as various as Elgar, Denton Welch and Edward Sackville-West, De-la-Noy had particular acquaintance with many of the events he described. He also had edited Prism and been a member of the House of Laity of the Church Assembly; but most importantly De-la-Noy had been Ramsey’s press officer between 1967 and 1970. The book is well stocked with eye-witness testimony, and is supplemented with varied and useful interview evidence, including interviews with members of Ramsey’s family, and from Ramsey himself. It is an opinionated and entertaining read, adding much in the way of colour which Chadwick tended to eschew. De-la-Noy made no claim for the status of authorised biography for the book. Indeed it is called a Portrait rather than a Life, and the strengths of the
67 The phrase appears in the Authorised Version translation, at Hebrews 12:1. 68 Margaret Duggan, Runcie. e making of an archbishop (London, 1983) 69 Simpson, Hundredth Archbishop 70 Martin, Great Christian Centuries, pp.2, 7. 71 De-la-Noy, Ramsey. 18 Archbishop Ramsey book are also its weaknesses. De-la-Noy did not have access to the official papers at Lambeth, and makes limited and superficial use of easily accessible printed sources. As such, it depends heavily on the memories of interviewees, and is more dogmatic in its judgments than the sources ought to allow. It is also critical where Great Christian Centuries was not, representing the disappointment of radical hopes when viewed at a greater distance. De-la-Noy also left his position at Lambeth after some controversy, as documented in 1971 in his ownA Day in the Life of God.72 That earlier book is an indictment of the state of the established Church of England from a young radical Anglican, marred by a tendentious attempt to justify the manifest error of judgment on De-la-Noy’s part that led to his dismissal. The copy in my possession is a pre-publication copy sent to the Ramseys, but despite this particular olive branch, Ramsey thought it a tragic shame that it should ever have been published. The later study, even with the Ramseys’ co-operation, shows signs of old scores being settled; arguments lost with Ramsey in person being re-joined from a distance, but without full possession of the necessary information. The other study of Ramsey to appear in 1990 is the one with which every student of Ramsey must reckon; Michael Ramsey. A life by Owen Chadwick. One would need to read the book carefully to notice (such is his self-effacement), but Chadwick was himself involved at the very centre of several of the events he describes. He had been part of the delegation that had accompanied Ramsey to Moscow in 1956.73 He was a member of the commission on synodical government, and chairman of the influential commission on Church and State which reported in 1970.74 Even less well-known was their contact over scholarly matters. Ramsey read and appreciated Chadwick’s e Victorian Church when it appeared in 1966.75 He also sought Chadwick’s counsel upon the draft pamphlet Image Old and New, Ramsey’s reply to John Robinson’s Honest to God, which Chadwick gave in a state of ‘doubt and difficulty’.76 As with many others, Ramsey had had an effect at a more personal level. ‘He was a warm man. He was very close to God’ Chadwick wrote shortly after Ramsey’s death. ‘To be near him was to be near Someone above and beyond him.’ It was Chadwick who preached at the memorial service for Ramsey in Westminster Abbey in June 1988.77
72 De-la-Noy, A Day in the Life of God. 73 Simpson, Hundredth Archbishop, p.148. 74 Its report appeared as Church and State (London, 1970). 75 Ramsey to Chadwick, 30 August 1966, at Ramsey Papers 94, f.299. 76 Chadwick to Ramsey, 6 March 1963, at Ramsey Papers 50, ff.62–63. 77 Stock, Taking Stock, pp.49, 56. Introduction 19
Of course there is room for more work on Ramsey. Naturally, Chadwick did not deal directly with the debates about secularisation and the 1960s that have since been prompted by the work of Callum Brown and others in recent years. He also tended to underplay the force and significance of conservative opinion, and particularly conservative evangelicalism. More prosaically, having been completed before the Ramsey Papers were catalogued, it has no references to the papers which a scholar could follow, and an inadequate index. That said, the debt that this current study owes to Chadwick will be evident on every page. But where Chadwick seeks to document, this study looks to interpret; and its burden is with the shape of the Church. Chapter 1 starts where Ramsey himself began, with the relationships between the constituent parts of the Body of Christ, the different Christian denominations, both at home and abroad. As the Church of England moved closer to the other parts of the Anglican Communion, and the Communion towards other churches at the global level, so did the Church of England move closer to other churches in the United Kingdom. This movement was both prompted by and necessitated change in the relationship between the Church and the State in the UK, in the matter of the House of Lords, the crown appointments to Church offices, and more fundamentally. This renegotiation is the subject of Chapter 2. That change was partly a recognition that Britain had changed since the constitutional arrangement of Church, State and law had been put in place. Chapter 3 deals with Ramsey’s reaction to the radical series of reforming legislation in the matter of the moral law. Ramsey saw more clearly than many that the distinction between crime and sin needed to be clearer, if an increasing number of those subject to the law had ceased to recognise the category of sin at all. It was in the interest of both Church and State that the boundaries of their respective disciplines were clear. But these changes were not made in an atmosphere of leisure. The long 1960s have been read as a time of simultaneous crises in multiple spheres of national and international affairs. Within the churches there was a mounting sense that the language of the Church, both in worship and in theology, was not being understood. Chapter 4 examines Ramsey’s role in the revision of the Book of Common Prayer (the Church’s worshipping language), and in the celebrated case of John A.T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, and his Honest to God (1963). The sense of crisis was also to spread to the nation at large by the last years of Ramsey’s office, and the chapter also considers his actions in relation to Northern Ireland, and the expectations that at least some of the public had of the archbishop as a national figurehead. 20 Archbishop Ramsey
Archbishops of Canterbury had long had opportunities to speak truth to power; to speak prophetically against the powerful and in favour of the weak, both at home and abroad. Chapter 5 shows that this, in part, suited Ramsey’s politics very well, but also that how that prophetic voice could be heard was changing as the shape of the Church changed. The Church of England needed to learn to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land. Bibliography
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